


easy as the ebb and flow

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Disabled Character, Established Relationship, Female Friendship, Mid-life Crisis, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Planet Alderaan (Star Wars), Planet Tatooine (Star Wars), Politics, Polyamory Negotiations, Rebel Alliance (Star Wars), Slavery, Tumblr Prompt, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:27:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29613591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Breha Organa, exiled Queen of Alderaan, has a midlife crisis and makes a friend.
Relationships: Bail Organa & Breha Organa & Leia Organa, Bail Organa/Breha Organa, Breha Organa & Beru Whitesun, Breha Organa & Luke Skywalker, Breha Organa & Saw Gerrera, Jyn Erso & Leia Organa, Jyn Erso & Saw Gerrera, Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Owen Lars/Beru Whitesun, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 29
Kudos: 139





	easy as the ebb and flow

Breha knew her life would always be defined, in the deepest parts of her soul, by _before_ and _after_. Before and after her accident; before and after her accession. Before and after the war, before and after Bail, before and after Leia - and now before and after exile.

The thing about these sharp divides, Breha thought, was that you never had any time to prepare. You fell off a mountain, you fell in love, your husband laid a baby in your arms, and your life was different, forever. The spring tide rolled in and left you floundering in its wake, trying to learn how to swim. The whole experience had a strange feeling of unreality to it, a vertigo-inducing dizziness that Breha remembered from the first time she had bathed by herself after the accident and had seen the light from her pulmonodes glowing in the bathroom mirror, or the first time Bail had touched her hand and smiled. But neither of those experiences had been bad, only discombobulating, and Breha’s exile was underlaid with the sick sense that - of all the many things she had learnt how to do - going on the run just wasn’t one of them.

Under no other circumstances would Saw Gerrera have come as a relief, but sixty hours after Breha and Leia’s midnight flight from their summer home in the mountains he looked Breha clinically up and down and said “You look like you haven’t eaten for a week,” and Breha felt suddenly _real_. Not the ghost of a queen; not the echo of a ruler, spoken to in hushed voices, as if the assassins rumoured on the holonet really had taken her life. Just a woman who had forgotten to eat the meals she had so carefully timed for her daughter, and now knew just how hungry she was. 

An aide bleated something about _her majesty_. 

“My name is Breha,” Breha said, and smiled resolutely through the pain. “I am no longer Queen of anywhere, but I am very hungry.” 

Gerrera gave her a hard look, but not an unkind one. “I don’t know about that,” he said, and pulled a ration bar from his pocket and tossed it to her underarm. She caught it. “Start with that.” He collected one of his fighters with a glance, and Breha was surprised to realise when she came forward that she was not a short Umbaran, as Breha had initially thought, but a grubby human girl of about the same age as Leia. “Go and tell Mica to put the caf on and get some decent food going. Take her highness with you. You kids should stretch your legs.”

“Leia,” Leia said, always quick to take a cue. “My name’s Leia. Sir.”

Gerrera’s eyebrow spasmed in an expression Breha couldn’t read. “Off you go. Leia.”

The other girl jerked her head at Leia, and the two of them vanished. Breha peeled the packaging off her ration bar and ate it.

Gerrera watched her, silently. “Feel a bit unreal, does it?” he said, when she had finished the bar.

“Yes. Thank you for the bar.”

“I imagine a lot of people will know what it’s like to be driven from their homes by the Empire, where you’re going,” Gerrera said, and Breha heard the unspoken _and they won’t have hidden Corellian bank accounts to cushion the landing_.

“I just hope my cousin’s up to the job,” Breha said. “I never trained him to succeed me. And holding the line against Palpatine will be no mean feat, since he’s framed Bail for treason.”

  
  
“Framed?” Gerrera snorted. “I thought he was a very skilled traitor, myself. Or he’d be dead by now.”

  
“He might be,” Breha said, cool and sweet. Gerrera flung up a hand and laughed.

Leia returned to her mother’s side two hours later. She was grubby and bruised, but she had a light in her eyes Breha hadn’t seen since they had to leave with little more than Leia’s pyjamas and the droid Bail had assigned to care for her. R2-D2 was only an astromech, and thirty years old at that, but he had a way of keeping up with Leia none of her organic carers could manage. Artoo was trailing behind now, bleeping binary profanities; the combination of Leia and Saw’s little urchin seemed to have defeated even him. Breha didn’t let Leia see she was impressed.

“How old did you say Jyn was?” Breha asked Gerrera. 

“I didn’t,” Gerrera said. “Slightly older than little miss Leia. She’s a scrappy little fighter, your girl, do they teach brawling in palaces?”

“No. Leia has a natural gift,” Breha said dryly. “Bail is talking about a Teräs Käsi tutor. Send us your Jyn, if you ever think she might need a safe haven - temporary or otherwise.”

“Send me your Leia if you want her to run the Rebellion,” Gerrera countered. “It’ll do her good to learn what things are like at the sharp end.”

“A generous offer,” Breha said smoothly, trying to conceal that the last thing she wanted was for Leia to run the Rebellion.

He beetled his eyebrows at her. “Only as generous as yours was.”

“I meant it.”

Gerrera grunted, and moved a piece on the dejarik board they were using to occupy their time. “I meant mine, too.”

  
  


Gerrera put her on a ship to a moon near Mon Cala with a datastick full of information in her bra, and a greater sense of reality than she’d had since Bail had called, saying Vader’s agents had tried to kill him in Coruscant and Breha and Leia must move at once. That sense of reality buoyed Breha up, making her feel like the galaxy might yet have some solidity to it, for as long as it took her to reach the highly deniable rendezvous and reunite with Bail. And then Bail took her hands and said he had something to tell her, and all her newfound faith in solid ground rapidly evaporated. 

_Before_ and _after_ , Breha thought: there would never again be a time when she lived with the security of not knowing who her daughter really was.

Of course she had known, or guessed, part of the truth. It was impossible for her not to know that Leia was Force-sensitive: she had played a major part in concealing that fact, had hired a tutor who went by a name they’d never been called in the Jedi Temple. Bail had told her, too, of the tumultuous first days of the Empire on Coruscant, and his ill-fated sortie to the Jedi Temple, where he’d seen a boy die for the lightsaber in his hands. You didn’t need to be as shrewd as Breha was to know that Leia had been a Jedi orphan.

Dangerous knowledge. She had asked Bail not to tell her more, lacking the recklessness or courage that let him waltz through the halls of the Senate with treason in his heart. She’d built the dangerous secret of her daughter’s gifts into her plans, and prepared for the day when they might have to flee, or even to fake Leia’s death and ensure her escape. But what she hadn’t known to expect, she couldn’t prepare for, and she couldn’t have expected this.

“But Padmé died pregnant,” Breha said, the galaxy wavering dangerously on its axis. “I attended the cortège!”

Bail, still gripping her hands tightly, shook his head. “I helped Kenobi carry her into the delivery suite. I held both twins when they were born.”

  
“Both -” Breha began, somewhat louder than she’d intended, and immediately lowered her voice. “ _Twins_? Bail -”

Bail grimaced. Breha’s mind raced, running back through a thousand tiny incidents in Leia’s life, a hundred thousand flickers of something that had seemed like nothing. She latched onto just one.

  
“Leia’s imaginary friend. What was it - Prestor.” 

“I suggested Prestor as a name,” Bail said. “I doubt you remember - it was so insignificant - but she initially wanted to call him Luke.”

Breha stared at him, and sat down on the floor, and stared at that too. The galaxy stabilised beneath her feet with the faint dangerous promise of not-quite-thin ice.

  
“Breha -”

“Where is he?” Breha said. “I want to meet him.”

  
  


Bail took both her and Leia to a Mon Calamari ship freshly arrived from the Outer Rim, crewed only by the most trustworthy and loyal the Rebel Alliance had to offer. And there Breha met Leia’s brother: another before and after, this one labelled _Luke Skywalker_. 

The memory was sketched so vividly in her mind Breha thought it might be beyond forgetting. That bright, pale room that should have been the captain’s ready room, cleared for their use; a shabby but purposeful couple from the Outer Rim, keeping a boy with cornflower eyes and sun-gold hair under careful watch; and Obi-Wan Kenobi, aged beyond his years by the vicious atmosphere of the planet he’d been living on, carefully introducing both twins to each other. Luke’s aunt and uncle had to encourage Luke forward at first; he seemed more nervous than Leia, who had had to learn not to be embarrassed before company from her earlier childhood, and who nobody had ever had to teach to be forthright. Breha supposed that this must be overwhelming, for a boy from a tiny settlement in the Outer Rim.

Breha watched, and the words Bail had used to tell her the truth echoed in her mind: simple words which spelled _before_ and _after_ more surely than anything else did. _Leia is Padmé’s daughter - Padmé’s daughter with Anakin Skywalker._

Breha’s whole chest shuddered like her pulmonodes were struggling. Breha held her breath, counted five seconds in her mind, and then released a deep, slow breath, feeling her pulmonodes shiver back into place. 

Obi-Wan Kenobi spoke of Anakin Skywalker as though he were dead, though at least something of the man plainly lived, and that something had hunted them across half the galaxy. With that example in mind, Breha had hardly needed to hear that Anakin Skywalker had been twisted into the Inquisitor known as Darth Vader to know what danger they were in - what danger they had always been in. Of course the Emperor would take great interest in the children of so powerful a Jedi as Anakin, so determined an opponent as Padmé. The fact that he had Anakin’s shell in his hand, trapped and mindless and a perfect tool, was a bonus: who better to hunt Vader’s children than Vader himself? It still wasn’t clear if the Emperor truly believed Padmé had had living children, or if Vader had merely gone on one of his brutal rampages, but unless Breha was as careful as she had been lucky, Leia and her sunshine twin would end up like the Inquisitors Breha had occasionally glimpsed through Bail’s briefings: tormented sentients who had learned to turn their pain on others.

But that was a nightmare for another day, Breha told herself, and not something to burden the children with. 

Luke and Leia gravitated towards each other, bright and unhesitating, as soon as they had made the first steps. “Like two halves of a whole,” Breha said to Obi-Wan Kenobi in an undertone, when the children were chattering freely away and Kenobi stepped back.

"They are," he said, with frightening seriousness. "They play off each other in the Force like a pair of amplifiers."

"Is that dangerous?" Breha said, alarmed. Bail was silent.

"Any source of power is dangerous," Kenobi said, which were not the most reassuring words Breha had ever heard.

But they were happy, she thought, and at least for the moment they were safe from Darth Vader and the Emperor. Over the next few weeks the pursuit, initially fierce, dwindled. Without incontrovertible proof, the Emperor seemed disinclined to believe that Darth Vader had ever had a living child; Padmé’s handmaidens had done their work well and convincingly, and even twelve years later their deception held up. Nobody in the Empire’s decision-making bodies noticed the departure of an unobtrusive Tatooinian couple and their nephew, with his tell-tale name, from their homestead. The death squad sent after Bail was sufficient excuse for the abrupt disappearance of Breha and Leia, now commonly believed to be dead, and Alderaan was in uproar.

Breha watched the holonews almost obsessively, and wrote out briefings, plans, press releases: nothing that could be acted on, but nothing she could suppress, either. If she didn’t write down her thoughts they came out anyway, staccato unguarded sentences that took Bail by surprise, fragments muttered to herself in the fresher. Her chest began to twinge so badly she sought the advice of a medical droid, in case her pulmonodes were malfunctioning at the worst possible time. The droid diagnosed anxiety, and made a series of recommendations mostly relating to sleep patterns, caffeine intake, and healthy exercise that Breha largely ignored. 

She needed Alderaan. And if not Alderaan, she needed a meaningful occupation.

Looking about her for something to do, she felt uncomfortably adrift. Her rule had taken up almost her whole life, and now it was gone beyond her reach - permanently, unless they could unseat the Emperor. Bail, of course, remained a founding member of the Alliance, and more deeply enmeshed in its politics than ever. Obi-Wan was training the twins intensively, trying to make up for the years they had missed, and sedulously avoiding military attempts to get him to take up a position as a strategic advisor. Even Luke’s uncle, a taciturn man aged beyond his years by Tatooine’s suns, had found a role: his gruff patience and persistence was ideally suited to training recruits who knew which end of a blaster barrel went where but didn’t know anything else.

Luke’s aunt… 

Breha had to confess she barely knew Luke’s aunt, and certainly didn’t know what she was doing now. They’d been introduced, but had both been heavily occupied with watching the children they’d raised learn to be siblings after twelve years of separation. They crossed paths every now and again, but they didn’t have many reasons to come into contact, not even the children. Luke and Leia were old enough to move freely around the ship, and had quickly learned every nook and cranny of their shifting homes. They hardly ever asked permission to seek each other out, and moved in almost uncanny synchrony. Obi-Wan said he thought that would wear off, with time, as they grew into adult personalities.

That was the only time Breha had ever seen Luke’s aunt react with more than placid calm. Breha had pointed out to Obi-Wan that Leia appeared to have been born with her personality and it was only getting more concentrated over time, and Beru had grinned. 

Breha, sitting at her desk idly filling out a number puzzle to while away the hours, flipped a pen between her fingers and thought. Bail hurried into the cabin, and she nearly dropped the pen, grasping at it as it fell through her fingers.

“I’m sorry for startling you.” Bail kissed her cheek, and she tilted her head into the gesture. This at least had not changed; here at least the galaxy was still solid beneath Breha’s feet. “Only a flying visit - I need to change.”  
  


“Can you remind me,” Breha said, “of Luke’s aunt’s name?”  
  


Bail paused. “Beru,” he said. “Beru Whitesun Lars. Lars is Luke’s uncle’s surname; Whitesun is her birth surname.” He coughed. “I did wonder if they’d add Kenobi, but -”

“What?”

“I’m not surprised you haven’t heard,” Bail said delicately. “Everyone is very carefully _not_ talking about it. But Obi-Wan shares a cabin with Beru and Owen. He has his own assigned cabin and sometimes he uses it, but… not often.” He cleared his throat. “According to the gossip.”

“And of course a senator never gossips,” Breha said dryly. Bail grinned, and removed his outer cloak.

Breha stared at the wall for a moment, listening to the familiar sounds of Bail changing his clothes, falling over his own feet while changing to a different pair of boots, and banging drawers open and shut. Then she picked her pen up again and made a note, scribbling on the edge of her number puzzle, to further her acquaintance with Beru Whitesun Lars.

This turned out not to be very difficult. Mrs Whitesun Lars had agreed, according to Leia, to attend an exhibition of their lightsaber skills thus far. It didn’t take Breha long to figure out that the lightsaber skills were actually being demonstrated with staves, or to realise that the proper name was a kata: Obi-Wan Kenobi had sensibly balked at letting either twin loose with one of the very few operational lightsabers they possessed, and had stuck to teaching them the basics with plain plastic staves. It also didn’t take her long to realise that Leia, like Luke, was bursting to show off. Breha smiled at this evidence that her daughter, suddenly so remote, hadn’t changed as much as she might have thought. Leia didn’t make her choices in the hope of an audience, but she appreciated one, and she loved to know that her parents were pleased with her work. Breha had rearranged her schedule to accommodate a lot of recitals and school plays, though she was privately convinced that acting wasn’t among her daughter’s perfections. Padmé had been excellent at dissimulation, so presumably Leia got that from Anakin.

Breha agreed, with great politeness, that the very thing she needed in her life was the chance to watch her daughter hit her newfound brother with a stick, and presented herself at the room Obi-Wan had taken over with great promptitude. She found Luke’s aunt there, though not his uncle - Luke explained to her in the courtly Alderaanian he had learnt so quickly from Leia that Uncle Owen had been called away to deal with a problem in the armoury - or Bail. Bail, she knew, was busy holding secret talks with Mon Mothma, possibly the only thing short of Darth Vader himself that would have kept him away.

Breha should not have been told this, but Bail was making up for years of secrecy by telling her a lot. Breha attributed this to guilt.

The twins had only been in Obi-Wan Kenobi’s tuition for a few short months, but it seemed to Breha that they had advanced a great deal. Luke’s Aunt Beru murmured that she thought the two of them competed with each other, less trying to outdo each other than seeing in each other the evidence of what was possible. Leia had certainly rarely had a classmate who kept up with her in everything she tried to do, but here she had met an equal. Searching for distinctions between them, Breha decided that Leia’s fierceness might be a little more disciplined; Luke, Breha saw once they turned from katas to a straightforward match, had a better eye for his opponent’s weaknesses.

“He’s never studied anything of the kind before?” she said to Beru.

“No,” Beru said, rather dryly. “No occasion for it. He shoots very well, though, and we gave up on keeping him out of speeders some years ago.”  
  


“We allow Leia to drive speeders only where she isn’t in violation of the law and only if accompanied by Artoo,” Breha confided. “On the basis that Artoo won’t stop her driving much too fast but he _will_ stop her crashing.”

Beru smiled.

The children finished their match - Luke won; Obi-Wan disarmed them both and told Leia she should be more careful of her defence - and, at Obi-Wan’s prompting, bowed politely to their audience, who clapped. Then they went to tidy up, and Obi-Wan came over to speak to both guardians. 

He was slightly flushed, Breha noticed, and wondered if his eyes lingered on Beru. She thought that they did, a little. It was hard to know; he had always been good at keeping a straight face, but his years in the desert had taught him a kind of patient immobility that made him very difficult to read. Breha glanced at Beru, and realised she was equally difficult to read, either because Breha didn’t know her well enough or because she was being deliberately placid. Or both.  
  


“Thank you for coming,” Obi-Wan said. “It really motivated them both.”  
  


“They’re good students, I hope,” Breha said, and Obi-Wan nodded. He pushed his hair - still mostly red, Breha noticed, but much greyer than it had been during the war - off his forehead. 

“Luke is easily fascinated, which always grabs Leia’s attention, and when he loses interest Leia’s persistence keeps him on track.” He smiled the brief, charming smile that had made the Negotiator so popular with the holonet. “I don’t say they are easy to teach -”  
  


“If you did, we wouldn’t believe you,” Beru broke in, smiling. “But they’re doing well?”

“Very well,” Obi-Wan said, and his smile, this time, was less fleeting. 

“Would they be called padawans now?” Breha asked, scouring her memory for whatever she had once known of the Jedi Knights. She’d never known as much as Bail, though Jedi had often been guests in her household. And for the last twelve years it had been politic to forget what little she had known. 

“No. Not yet. And I don’t think either is meant to be my padawan.” Obi-Wan glanced back at them, currently bickering cheerfully over the packing up of the pads and helmets they’d worn. Apparently there had been some early accidents; the staves weren’t all that light. “It’s too soon to tell.”  
  


“We’ll see,” Beru said comfortably. “Do they have lessons now?”

  
  
“Yes. Not meditation,” Obi-Wan said, rolling his eyes. “I know better than to think I could get them to concentrate after this. Rex is teaching them strategy and tactics.”  
  


“Leia must love that,” Beru said, surprising Breha, who hadn’t realised Beru knew Leia so well. The children ran in and out of half a dozen different cabins where they’d been made welcome, but it hadn’t occurred to her that Leia must have been spending considerable amounts of her free time with the Larses, her brother’s guardians. 

  
“She certainly takes to it,” Obi-Wan said. “And Rex keeps them in line. They respect him.” He bowed slightly - and Breha thought, or maybe she only imagined, there was an additional glance for Beru. “Excuse me. I should take them down. Owen has opinions about letting them run amok anywhere near the armoury.”

“I should hope so!” Breha said, appalled. “Up till now we’ve been able to keep Leia away from fire-arms -” Obi-Wan’s face took on a certain solidity. “ _Master Kenobi._ ”

“In my defence,” Obi-Wan said gravely, “I knew nothing about it until afterwards. Also in my defence I’m not sure I could have prevented Wolffe teaching her to handle a blaster if I’d tried. He thinks she has a natural talent.”  
  


Breha breathed deeply through her nose. She was very confident Leia did have a talent and that it would be impossible to prevent her from displaying it. “You,” she said definitely, “can explain this to Bail.” 

He gave her a courtly bow. “Of course.”  
  


Breha seethed internally for a moment, then recovered herself and smiled at Beru rather tightly. She’d come here for more than one reason. “I like Obi-Wan very much, but he is -”

  
“Maddening?” Beru supplied understandingly.

Caught by surprise, Breha laughed. “I wouldn’t have thought you would think so - but yes.”

“Oh, on the contrary,” Beru said serenely. “Obi-Wan Kenobi can be the most annoying man alive. It’s just that he very rarely does it on purpose.”

“Come and tell me more over tea,” Breha invited. “I feel I don’t know you as well as I should, given you’re my daughter’s aunt.”  
  


Beru gave her a thoughtful look. “Thank you,” she said. “I’d like to. I don’t think I have the airs and graces to take tea with a queen, though.”  
  


Breha smiled through the same sharp stabbing pain she’d felt since Alderaan blurred into nothing beyond the blue glow of hyperspace. “You’re in luck,” she said. “I’m not a queen any more.”

Breha’s sitting room, where she and Bail worked, ate, and had the few private meetings they required, wasn’t as large as the spacious apartments she’d been accustomed to - but she knew she was lucky to have any additional space at all. She might have found the cramped quarters and relative privations harder to bear, but she had almost none of her possessions left to her, so the rooms still felt dream-like and strange. Like none of this had ever really happened, and she’d wake up in bed, the Queen of Alderaan once more. A queen with some very odd nightmares.

Breha shook this idea off as she boiled the kettle. Work, she told herself, that’s what you need. Something real.

“You’re not allergic to anything, are you?” she asked. “Those sweets have ground almonds in.” They were traditional Alderaanian delicacies; someone had heard from Bail that she liked them, and had managed to pick them up in a market without exciting suspicion. Breha had been almost overwhelmed by the kindness of it, and also very much alarmed that she appeared to be considered an object of pity. At least the tea was the same drink that anyone could get hold of - the decaffeinated option. After some consideration, Breha had taken the med-droid's point about her caf intake.

“Oh, no,” Beru said. “They look delicious. Thank you for sharing them with me.”

  
“Thank you for joining me,” Breha said, and explained the history of the sweets, mostly for something to say.

  
“You must miss Alderaan very much,” Beru observed, when she finished.

“Of course,” Breha said, caught off guard. “As much as you miss Tatooine, I expect.”  
  


Beru shook her head, and her mouth twitched. “I always wanted to travel. And I wasn’t dragged from my home on thirty seconds’ notice under death threats.”  
  


Breha shuddered involuntarily. “It wasn’t very - pleasant, no. But Tatooine is your home; you must miss it.”  
  


“Some things,” Beru said, with the same devastating matter-of-factness that she’d insulted her - partner? - with. “Others, not so much. It’s a hard place to live. Farmers like myself and Owen come under a lot of pressure from the Hutts.”

  
“Really?” Breha said, horrified. The Empire was certainly a live threat to any planet in the galaxy, but the Hutts’ bullying and rapacity was well-known. “I remember reading that Tatooine has no official planetary government - how do you defend yourselves?”

  
“Nobody much troubles with folk as small as us.” Beru’s limpid blue eyes glittered disquietingly. “And whenever things were getting particularly difficult, Obi-Wan used to disappear for a couple of weeks - and then a while after he came back we’d learn that a slave-ring had been disrupted in Mos Eisley, or an illegal mine caved in out by Mos Pelgo. And the pressure would let up.” 

“He lived with you, then?” Breha said, trying to put together these statements and make sense. She poured hot water into the tea - the herbal option: fragrant rather than stiff with caffeine - and set a cup opposite Beru, who murmured thanks. Whatever she’d said about airs and graces, Breha could tell where Luke had learned his courtesy.

Beru tilted her head ambiguously, side to side. “Sometimes. It -” she frowned, hard, and took a sweet to give herself time to think, clearly mulling over her words. Breha waited. “You can’t have seen him around the end of the war. He was a horrible mess.”

  
  
“Bail said he was… distraught.”

“Bail’s a clever man.” Beru rubbed her forehead and sighed. “He came out of the desert looking like death warmed over. He tried to leave Luke with us and go, but we made him stay until he was better. Still, he thought it was his duty to go, and - neither Owen nor I would want to trap him, you see. He has, or maybe he _had_ , now, a house not far away from us, in the Wastes. It took a lot of persuading to get him to come back to us, even just for a while. He lacked a purpose, I think, and it made him uneasy and unsteady.”

  
Breha was uncomfortably silent.

Beru shrugged. “He comes and he goes. It’s hard for him to believe, I think, that he can have any happiness that won’t be immediately ripped from him, and also hard for him to believe we won’t try to change him.” 

Breha stirred her tea and kept silence. She had not liked Satine Kryze’s style of philosophical debate very much, and she had several times hummed and uh-huh’d her way through long calls from Bail, who had spent many hours in a different political era trying to keep the peace between an aggrieved Kenobi and a hissing Duchess of Mandalore.

“He might eventually stay.” Beru’s mouth twitched in a smile. “It’s been ten years. The odds look better than they did. But if he chooses not to, we’ll accept that.”  
  


“That’s very understanding of you,” Breha said, and watched Beru’s eyes narrow in sudden laughter. She was not a very expressive woman: her blue eyes were steady, and she usually maintained a calm so total it seemed almost nerveless, permanently content and always quick to smile, even if only slightly. But Breha had rarely seen her laugh. 

“He needs understanding,” Beru said dryly. “He’d wear himself out without Owen to tell him not to be such a fool. Anyway - yes, Obi-Wan lived with us part of the time, so yes, it didn’t take half a brain to notice that his absence from the farm generally coincided with some Hutt somewhere, or one of their minions, getting a bloody nose.”

Breha sipped at her tea, and tucked all those little snippets away for discussion with Bail and detailed thought later. “You ran a moisture farm, I think,” she said.

Beru nodded.

“It must be hard, not to have that occupation any more."

"As hard as it is not to be a queen any more?" Beru gave her a very shrewd look. 

Breha took a deep breath. "I miss my work," she acknowledged carefully, and saw Beru's face soften. "And my home."

"I miss my home," Beru said, eating another sweet. "But I didn't set out to be a moisture farmer. Old Mr Cliegg wouldn't dream of leaving the farm, and he left it in Owen's hands. So it was give up Owen or get used to farming."

"And you got used to farming." Breha watched the tiniest of changes in Beru's face, and made a guess. "But that wasn't all your work, was it?"

"I am also a trained accountant," Beru said blandly, and laughed when Breha raised her eyebrows. "I don't envy your ministers! Nothing gets past you."

Breha waited. Beru poured herself another cup of tea, and waited likewise. The silence held for several long minutes, until a cloud passed over Beru's face, and she said: "I suppose it doesn't matter any more. We won't be going back for many years, after all; probably never."

Breha thought of the spires of Ciudad Alderá, gleaming in the sunlight, and suppressed a pang. "Neither will I."

"No," Beru said, and her smile had a sharp edge. "Who could either of us tell the truth to? All right, then. My mother-in-law - Anakin's mother - was in charge of a stop on the freedom trail. I inherited her duties."

"Freedom for slaves?" Breha said. She knew enough about the Outer Rim to know that in Hutt Space, slavery ran rampant; Bail and Padmé had spent frustrating years trying to ram through bills that would have strengthened and enforced existing anti-slavery law, always coming up against one or another powerful interest that owed money to, or required the compliance of, the Hutts. Once the war had begun, action was impossible; the bargain made for free Republic passage through Hutt Space precluded it.

Unpleasantly, Breha remembered Padmé telling her how disappointed Palpatine had seemed when he'd said it was impossible. They had all been much younger then, and Padmé had still trusted Palpatine - up to a point.

"Dangerous work," Breha said.

"Very." Beru looked troubled. "I just hope nobody looks too hard at our disappearance. I destroyed any evidence before we left, but -"

Breha nodded. Overly close examination of the Lars’s affairs might still produce a hint of what Beru had been up to, and then her whole network would be at risk. "Let's hope," she said. "Do you still do… similar work?"

"The Alliance needs people who understand Hutt Space," Beru said, which was neither yes nor no. "I'm sure they need queens too."

Breha drew in a sharp breath. "I'm not queen of anything any more."

"You weren't idle," Beru countered. "You have skills, knowledge, information. Obi-Wan thinks you're keeping yourself to yourself so much because you're mourning Alderaan, but as perceptive as he is, he's an idiot."

"I'm not sure those two go together."

"You should spend more time with Obi-Wan. You miss Alderaan, but what has you pining is your lack of purpose, isn't it?"

Breha drew in another sharp breath. Beru smiled.

"Your planet isn't everything you are," she said.

"It has been," Breha said. "For nearly thirty years." She looked down at her cup of tea, and helped herself to another sweet. "But that, I fear, will have to change."

"Change is not always evil," Beru says. "There can be… advantages."

"And some day," Breha said, "when we're off the Emperor's death list, we might both be able to think of them."

Beru laughed, and now there was a note of bitterness in it. "I'll drink to that," she said.

She and Breha finished the teapot.  
  



End file.
